Many commercial and industrial products are liquids such as cleaning chemicals, solvents, lubricants, water and other industrial chemicals and the like. Such products are presently bottled in bottles, jugs, pails, drums and other containers that are distributed utilizing an accumulating facility fabricated to provide the accumulation of a supply of the liquid product together with extensive high speed bottling and filling facilities. Such bottling facilities are subject to economic considerations which require the limitation of their locations to portions of the distribution area which process and service large volumes of the liquid product. As a result, such bottling and distribution centers tend to be extremely large and the distribution of bottled product involves long distance shipping and costs attendant thereto. For the most part, the raw liquid product or its constituents are shipped in bulk to storage facilities within the bottling plant together with appropriate supplies of empty containers, labels and various shipping cartons or boxes. In attempting to maximize efficiency, bottlers tend to operate multiple high speed bottling lines which tolerate very little variation and flexibility. During such bottling, the empty bottles or other liquid containers are arranged in extended lines in which automated filling, capping and sealing of the bottles takes place. In many, if not most such bottling lines, various labels are also applied. The completed and bottled product is then typically packed within boxes or shipping cartons and arranged on shipping pallets. In some operations, large volume containers are shipped directly on specialized pallets without the need for boxes or cartons. The completed palletized product is then distributed to a plurality of localized distribution centers from which the product is further spread out and distributed to more localized merchandisers. Products flow through streams of commerce characteristic of various industries such as automotive products, commercial chemical products, specialized trucking industries and so on.
While the shipping costs associated with all such liquid products form an undesired portion of the total cost of product processing, in certain liquids the product volume and weight disproportionally increases operating costs to prohibitive portions. One such product which is known in the diesel industry as Diesel Exhaust Fluid, or “DEF” serves as an excellent example of the disproportionate increase of shipping and distributing costs of high volume, high weight liquids. Other similar liquid products associated with high weight and large volume are found in the various high viscosity products such as grease, lubricating oils and the like.
Faced with the prohibitive effect of high shipping costs upon overall product and system costs associated with widely dispersed large volume bottling facilities, practitioners in the art are desperate to reduce the ever-increasing shipping cost. There arises therefore an unfilled and unresolved need in the art for ever more efficient, low cost and more effective systems for shipping and distributing large volume high weight liquid products such as DEF.